


Break the Spell

by lilacsigil



Category: Luke Cage (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Black Sky, F/F, Healing, Herbalism, Post-Canon, Team Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-29
Updated: 2019-05-29
Packaged: 2020-03-26 18:46:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19011691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilacsigil/pseuds/lilacsigil
Summary: Tilda Johnson is rebuilding her business with a super-powered clientele, when a mysterious woman appears one night in need of her help.





	Break the Spell

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ashling](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashling/gifts).



> Title is from Gabrielle Dennis's song "Family First", as performed in "Luke Cage" season 2.

Tilda moved her uncle Cornell's keyboard, her entire inheritance, into the back room of Mother's Touch. When she found herself wanting to cry for her family, she'd go play it out her system, like Mariah had played her. That woman didn't deserve a moment of her time, not even the fake, public Mariah that Tilda wished could have actually been her mother. Tilda donated her fancy suits and her beautiful long wigs to charity and wore her poor mistreated hair natural, each kink and curl a middle finger up at her mother. She stayed angry, cleaned up every piece of broken glass from the floor, ordered what new herbs she could afford, and removed the benches and shelves broken in the fight. And the customers started rolling in. 

The customers were no longer mainly the chronically ill and underinsured that she had expected, but admirers of Bushmaster, the man who had stood up to Luke Cage. 

"I need to be stronger. No steroids," said a muscular white woman, dressed ostentatiously in black leather. She would only give her name as Superia. 

"You look plenty strong already," Tilda replied, but the possibilities were already running through her head. 

"Yeah. But not strong enough. You saw that stupid video of Luke Cage flexing and showing off. Stronger than that." Her lip curled. "Stronger than the strongest man."

"We'll have to experiment. And I can't guarantee anything." 

Superia slapped something heavy on the counter. When she pulled her hand away, Tilda saw it was a small gold ingot, stamped 1KILO. Tilda put it on her pharmaceutical scales: indeed, it was a kilogram exactly. 

Superia nodded, pleased that Tilda had checked. "That should pay for the initial supplies and to get this place in working order."

The experiments were painful, almost as painful as Superia's endless monologues on female superiority, but Tilda managed to create an infusion that not only increased Superia's durability, but caused the excess energy to discharge with a bright green blast strong enough to knock an average person to the ground. 

"Magnificent!" Superia lifted Tilda off her feet in a powerful bear hug. Tilda thought for a moment that Superia was going to kiss her, but at the last moment Superia obviously remembered the rumours about how Mariah died, and pulled away. Tilda wasn't sure if she was disappointed or not: Superia was extremely dull, but very attractive. 

Superia must have spread the word to the powered community, though, because the customers didn't stop. A woman with ice-generating powers needed better heat tolerance so she could get through summer and, Tilda found out later from the news, try to break into Avengers Tower. A man with the powerful muscles of a snake needed help to keep his skin equally supple, and he could hardly take that question to the local pharmacy. He demonstrated his powers by crushing one of Tilda's chairs, though at least he politely paid for the damage afterwards. Another man wanted his electrical blasts to be more powerful, since at the moment they could barely distort phone signals, and that wasn't going to help him rise in the ranks of the mob. Interspersed with requests from local people failed by conventional medicine, Tilda was run off her feet. Barely a month after her mother's death, Tilda had not only been able to repair the entire store, but had a waiting list and was thinking of hiring an assistant. 

Late at night, she was in the back room carefully weighing ingredients when she heard a strange noise from the front of the shop. Powerful homemade pepper spray at the ready, she carefully crept to the door that led to the front and peered past the frame. The front doors were still closed and locked, but someone in a dark coat was lying very still on the floor, one arm outstretched. Tilda hit the light switch and checked for an ambush, but there was nobody else here. It was a woman, it seemed, with messy long dark hair obscuring her features. Tilda put her pepper spray on the floor by the counter, within easy reach, before kneeling down and checking for a response. 

If she hadn't been in doctor mode, she would have jumped out of her skin when the woman's outstretched arm moved with lightning speed to grab Tilda's wrist. She was holding a small, heavy object that she pressed into Tilda's hand, and groaned. 

"Payment," she gasped out, before lapsing into unconsciousness. 

The object was a large gold ring with a reddish-purple stone in it, but Tilda put that aside for now. She turned the patient into the recovery position, checking her breathing and circulation. It wasn't a coat she was wearing but a length of heavy black velvet with some curtain rings still attached, and underneath that she wore only ragged bandage-like wrappings. 

The patient was an Asian woman, fit and muscular, late twenties to early thirties, no obvious injuries apart from a quarter inch puncture wound to the left of her sternum. It was recent enough to be only barely scabbed over, and showed no obvious sign of infection, except that she had a fever. Her pulse was rapid and weak, and her skin so threaded with dark lines that Tilda thought for a moment that she had tattoos all over her body and face, until she realised that the marks were pulsing and swirling with her heartbeat. Tilda hovered over her phone for a moment, but she put aside the urge to call 911. The woman wasn't in immediate danger and she could have gone anywhere to find a doctor: she had appeared in Mother's Touch because that's the kind of help she wanted. Tilda still wasn't sure exactly how she'd got inside, but she certainly hadn't walked here: her bare feet were clean. 

In the flurry of getting her patient onto a camp bed and dosed with fever-relieving herbs, then taking biopsies of the black lines, Tilda completely forgot about the ring the woman had given her. It wasn't until, with yellow dawn displacing the harsh orange streetlights, that she saw it again, gleaming on the floor by the counter next to the pepper spray. Her test results were still going to take a little while and her patient was lying quietly, so she picked it up and took a few photos to send to her usual fence, Turk Barrett.

>Any chance you can ID this? 

Honestly, the gem, surrounded by characters she couldn't read, was so large that it looked fake. The sheer weight of the ring said that the gold, at least, was very real.

Turk replied surprisingly quickly for the early hour.

>Stay out that HAND shit!!!

This meant nothing to Tilda, so she replied with a question mark, but didn't hear anything more. Maybe Turk was taking his own advice for once and staying out.

The test results on the black substance were not what Tilda expected: she had thought that perhaps it was some kind of circulating poison, but in fact the qualities were all positive, energising and qi-stabilising. Yes, it was possible, considering the fever, that the patient had overdosed, but the way it was circulating in her skin made that seem unlikely to Tilda. She frowned. The black substance was heavy in calcium, but acute hypercalcemia didn't make sense with the woman's symptoms.

Tilda examined her again. Could it be that the black substance in her skin was normal for her? Her fever had decreased, but not as much as Tilda would have expected. Tilda folded down the blanket and observed the patterns on the woman's skin under the minimal cover of the ragged white bandages. Despite her athletic physique, her muscles and tendons stood out in a way that made Tilda think she'd rapidly lost weight. Apart from minor ligature marks on her wrists and the puncture wound over her heart, her skin was remarkably smooth: no scars, no freckles, no calluses. 

The way the black moved reminded Tilda of something, and she took a moment to place it: they were swirling along the meridian lines of Chinese medicine, the flow that would link up chakras in Ayurvedic theory. Instead of circulating smoothly around her body, though, they were pooling in particular areas, as if they had been isolated into zones. Tilda pulled on a pair of gloves and carefully ran her fingers over the top of her head, a physical examination rather than a visual one. Indeed, under her hair there was a tiny, hard bump, almost flush with her skin, right at the crown of her head. There was another at the base of her throat, and more at the meridian points on her torso, each preventing the dark lines flowing any further. Acupuncture needles of some kind, Tilda thought, inserted deeply to make them hard to find or remove. 

It wasn't a diagnosis by any means, but there was interference with the woman's energy, and it was apparently deliberate. Tilda grabbed ice packs from the freezer to lower her body temperature and slow her qi to reduce the risk of her reacting badly when all this pooled energy was suddenly released. When she was satisfied, and the speed of the swirling darkness had slowed, she carefully used forceps to remove the acupuncture pins, one at a time. They weren't modern needles, but extremely thin ivory-headed pins.

With each pin removed, the dark lines expanded and merged with each other, and then, as Tilda extracted the last from the crown of the head, faded away entirely. The woman sighed deeply and her tense muscles relaxed. Whatever Tilda had done was certainly having a positive effect. She took away the ice packs, trusting that the patient's body would now self-regulate. 

A loud knock came at the front door and Tilda cursed to herself: it was already 9 A.M. and she had an appointment scheduled for Mrs Mahmood, an elderly lady with severe arthritis. 

"On my way!" she called out, and quickly shed her gloves and pulled on a fresh dress, with a headband to get her hair off her face. 

Mrs Mahmood was at the door, leaning on her cane. "Sorry, dear. It was just with the doors still closed…I worry about you, with all the violence here recently."

"Oh no, it's my fault, I was researching and lost track of the time," Tilda smiled and led her to a chair. 

A few minutes into her consultation, a teenage boy wandered in. Puerto Rican, maybe, but not someone she knew. 

"May I help you?" she said with a wary smile. She'd had problems with teenagers trying to shoplift herbs they thought might get them high. 

"Nah, I'm good," he said, arousing her suspicion even further. He wasn't so much looking at the items in the shop, she noticed, as sniffing the air, dog-like. He was trying to be subtle, but, like most teenagers, wasn't particularly good at it. 

Mrs Mahmood was keeping her narrowed eyes on him, too. 

"Do you know him?" Tilda whispered.

"No, but I can tell when a boy's up to no good."

"Okay, you stay right here, I've got an idea." Louder, she said, "I think a heat rub is going to help with those knees, Mrs Mahmood. Let me make one up for you."

The teenager wasn't paying attention to her, but sniffing his way over towards where Tilda's patient had appeared in the middle of the night. Tilda walked behind the counter to her sealed supplies of herbs and opened up the hottest peppers that she had. They were scorpion peppers from Trinidad, dried and powdered, and she lightly flung the dust into the air near where the woman had lain on the floor. 

"Oh dear," she said, calmly. The boy immediately erupted in sneezes and ran out the door, clutching at his face and gasping for air. 

"Get out of here!" Mrs Mahmood called after him, shaking her cane. 

Tilda cleaned up the spilled pepper. "I do think a heat rub will help, Mrs Mahmood, but I'll make it fresh."

"Thank you, dear. Have you ever thought of getting a security guard in here? You never know what people will do these days."

"I think Dr Johnson can handle it," came a low-pitched, lightly accented voice from behind her. Tilda spun around: it was her patient, now standing, the dark lines vanished. She was wearing one of Tilda's kente sundresses. It was tailored West African style to fit Tilda closely, so it was hanging loose on the woman, but the bright pink, yellow and aqua print brought life to her washed-out face. 

Mrs Mahmood looked from one to the other, and got up out of her chair. "Why don't I come back tomorrow for that cream?"

"Thank you, Mrs Mahmood, I would appreciate that." Tilda helped her out the door, then quickly locked it. "Who are you and what did they do to you?"

She smiled just enough to show the edges of her teeth. "My name is Elektra Natchios. A group called the Hand gave me this power – " she shook her head, "Or it was part of me all along, I don't know. And they are trying to take it for their own." Elektra lightly touched where the puncture wound would be, over her heart.

"Wait, they were siphoning power from you?" Tilda wasn't sure if she was horrified or thrilled at the possibilities. 

"Mmm. It wasn't working so well." She should have looked ridiculous in the long, baggy dress, but instead it looked like royal robes as she walked through the shop with the grace of a dancer, perfectly in control. "I'd heard you were very skilled. It was true."

"Thank you, but now that you're awake, I want to know if this is going to cause problems for me with these Hand people. Aren't they the ones Luke Cage and his sidekick were fighting a little while ago?" Tilda had a possessive urge to grab Elektra's hands and stop her touching everything, but she could already see that it would be very difficult to stop Elektra doing anything. 

"Luke Cage and his sidekicks, yes. They did manage to destroy a good number of the Hand, but missed the most dangerous of them all," Elektra smirked. Tilda couldn't place her accent, exactly. It sounded as if it came from somewhere European, maybe France, but overlaid with the sounds of many different homes. Tilda's own accent wandered around America in the same way. 

"So this is going to cause me problems? Should I just give them Cage's address instead?"

Elektra laughed, and focused her full attention on Tilda. "Maybe you should. It was smart, throwing pepper at that apprentice, but they must already know that I brought myself here." She tied back her hair with one of Tilda's stretchy headbands, her exposed features sharp and alert. "I'll protect you. I owe you that, and I owe them a fight."

"Please don't have a fight in here. I've barely fixed the place after the last one!" Tilda smiled politely, but she wasn't joking. 

"Know anywhere better?"

Tilda smiled for real, this time. "For a destructive fight? Yeah, actually I do."

The CLOSED sign in place, the two women quickly gathered supplies from the shelves. Elektra didn't know exactly what the Hand used on her, but she could describe it in enough detail that Tilda could make some educated guesses. 

"Did the herb smell like this?" she asked, waving some under Elektra's nose. 

"Yes, but more acrid. And it was in the oil they used when they resurrected me, too."

"All right, maybe it's – wait, they brought you back from the dead?" Mariah's face, laughing and triumphant, flashed across Tilda's vision. 

Elektra took her hand. "No. Whoever you fear will not return. Preparations that have to be made first."

"Oh, thank God." Her mother coming back had seemed a lot worse and far more imminent than any threat from a ninja cult. "It was my mother. The world is better off without her."

Elektra laugh was a sharp bark. "I killed my sensei not long ago, my father figure. Also worth it."

"I didn't say that I –"

"Everybody knows who finally took out Mariah Dillard," Elektra replied, and kissed Tilda on the lips without fear or hesitation. 

Tilda grabbed onto Elektra like a lifeline, kissing her hard and digging her fingers into Elektra's muscular back. Elektra her fingers locked into Tilda's hair, and the other hand sliding along her bare upper arm. Elektra nipped at Tilda's lips a little, and Tilda bit harder before they pulled apart for air. 

"We should get moving," Tilda said, grinning, still tasting a little of Elektra's blood on her tongue. 

Elektra shrugged, but her face was alight too. "Show me where we're going to have this fight."

"First you need to get changed. You can't fight in that dress."

Elektra had a foot up at Tilda's throat in a moment, but she laughed to concede the point.

Tilda still had keys and the alarm code to Harlem's Paradise, and it was unlikely that anyone would be there at this time of the morning – the club's daily rhythms were buried deep in her bones. She hadn't heard that Luke Cage had changed much, and indeed when they arrived all was quiet. Maybe these Hand people would burn the place to the ground; she'd like to see Cage do something about that!

Elektra, now wearing Tilda's gym clothes, prowled through the club. "Too much open space." She glanced up at the balcony that now overlooked the dance floor and smiled her sharp-toothed smile. "Let's head up there."

They made their preparations, and didn't have long to wait before Elektra tilted her head to one side. "They're coming. Are you ready?"

Tilda grabbed her for another kiss. "Ready."

Elektra hurried down the stairs and leaned against the bar; Tilda ducked behind the door to the upstairs lounge. Cage had taken out the window, and it was easy to see the entire lower floor.

The Hand arrived en masse, perhaps forty young men and women dressed in dark red and moving in perfect harmony like a flock of birds. They spread out over the club and quickly pulled together into one group when they spotted Elektra. 

One of them, a man, came to the front. "You! Black Sky! Return what you stole and submit to the authority of the Hand!"

Elektra took a vodka bottle from the bar and flipped it over so she was holding it by the neck. "You have no authority. The Five are dead."

"Only four of them are dead!" the man shouted, then realised his error as Elektra smirked at him. 

"Thought so. This scheme had Gao's undead fingerprints all over it. I'm not coming with you. Do your worst." She flicked a lighter and lit the napkin she had stuffed into the neck of the bottle, and flung it into the face of the Hand flunky. 

It exploded into flame and the man threw himself to the floor, much more quickly alight than Tilda would have expected. She pressed her lips together to remind herself not to go to help, and maintained her position.

Elektra had leapt into the group, two of Tilda's sharpest knives at the ready, slashing and stabbing as she went. She was a tornado, spinning and leaping up before landing again to inflict more damage. The Hand troops were brutal in return, lashing out at her with weapons, punches and kicks, some of which were connecting hard, but Elektra couldn't pause or she would be overwhelmed in moments. She cut a swathe through the group then turned for more, blood trickling down her face and dripping over her wild grin. 

"You still think you can win?" she shouted, but the Hand reformed and attacked her again, this time in close formation to try to drag her down. 

Hearing footsteps outside the door to the upstairs lounge, Tilda quickly concealed herself behind the open door. The thump of a cane accompanied the footsteps: the woman Elektra had referred to as "the old dragon" was here, as she had suspected. Tilda tensed, afraid of what the leader of this cult might do, but stayed put. 

The old woman, Gao, walked past her and into the lounge, stooped and leaning on her cane. Tilda couldn't see quite where she was from behind the door, so she waited until the footsteps stopped before flinging the door shut. To her shock, Gao was right in front of her, observing her with great interest. 

"Hello, my dear," she said, with a slight twinkle in her eye. "You must be the friend that Elektra ran to. Doctor Tilda Johnson, was it?"

"Yes, ma'am," Tilda replied, with utmost politeness. She couldn't move away with the closed door and wall behind her, so she stood as straight as she could. Elektra had said this would work, and this old woman reminded Tilda of Mariah. Not the way she dressed or stood or spoke, but something in her eyes that was so immensely confident in her own power and ownership of others that nothing on earth could challenge that. Tilda squared her shoulders: she would never give in to that kind of tyrant. 

In that moment, Tilda saw a tiny vertical line form between Gao's eyebrows. It was the only sign that she was displeased, but Tilda had a lifetime of practice in reading those signs. 

"What have you done, girl?"

Tilda didn't let her own expression change at all. "Trapped an old dragon, it seems. Now, call off your minions."

"I could kill you in an instant."

"You could, but you don't care about me. And you know Elektra won't bargain for me." Elektra had told her to say that, but Tilda thought it was probably true. 

"Undo this," Gao snapped, with a gesture to the room, to the herbs in oil that Tilda had painted at the edges, completing the circle when she closed the door.

"No. Call off your minions."

Gao made a sharp gesture, and the sounds of fighting below came to a halt. "There."

Elektra leapt onto a table and from there managed a tremendous vertical jump up to the balcony. Gao watched her closely, but she was careful not to touch the line of infused oil with so much as a fingernail. 

"Here I am, Madame. Weren't you fast enough with the dragon bones? Are you going to turn to dust now, along with Alexandra and all your friends?"

Gao smiled, but Tilda, behind her, could see real tension in her shoulders. "Of course not, Elektra. You already suspect I am not the same as they were."

"I want no part of your battles. That's why I killed Stick, not because you ordered it." Elektra moved closer, her clothes stained with her own blood. Mostly her own. "If I cannot be free, I would rather be dead." 

Gao looked as if she would quite enjoy arranging that, but instead she bowed slightly. "So all you are asking is for this one lifetime?"

"That, and you leave my friends alone."

"My interest in them is purely related to my interest in you." Gao glanced over at Tilda. "Though this one is showing some promise, I have to say."

"You have my terms."

"Done. You young ones really don't think in the long term, do you? Generations have risen and fallen before me: I can wait one single lifetime." Gao thumped the tip of her cane on the floor. 

Tilda's lip twisted. "Dynastic thinking didn't work out too well in my family. Hope you've got better plans than they did."

Elektra dragged a finger through the oil on the edge of the balcony, making a gap, and Gao was gone faster than Tilda's eyes could follow. The dance floor and bar were in shambles, with glass, blood, burn marks and what Tilda was pretty sure was sulphur stains everywhere. Gao, though, had completely vanished.

Tilda gasped. "Did she fly? Jump? What is she?"

"I told you," Elektra grinned, her teeth white against the blood. "She's a dragon."

"No!" Tilda's heart was still beating fast – it always did, in Harlem's Paradise since Luke Cage renovated just enough to make it all feel wrong – and she grabbed Elektra by both wrists, pulling her in for another kiss. 

Elektra kissed her harder, letting Tilda walk them backwards to the big white leather sofa, another new development. Tilda flung her onto the couch and dove down with her, enjoying the sight of the pristine leather smeared with the blood from the fight. 

Catching onto Tilda's excitement, Elektra lifted the one knife she still had and stabbed it into the leather cushions of the sofa. Tilda put her hand over Elektra's and dragged the knife along, sending stuffing and brass buttons flying everywhere. They both laughed, and Tilda slid her fingers up into Elektra's stretch crop top, cupping her small breast and pressing against the hard nipple. Elektra, extremely flexible, wasted no time getting her strong thigh up between Tilda's legs and supporting her as she moved back and forth, laughing harder and harder in delight at the mess they'd made of the club, until her eyes rolled up her head and she came hard, the lights of Harlem's Paradise flickering in and out of her vision. 

A day later, it all seemed like a dream, even though she still had the heavy ring that Elektra had left her as payment. Tilda closed up the shop at five, tired after dealing with two days' worth of customers, and locked her takings in the safe. She suddenly felt eyes on her, and turned with a gasp, grabbing a knife from the bench beside her. 

"Hi," Elektra said, standing right in front of her, unafraid of the knife touching her stomach. "You want to help me hunt down some ninja?"

"Hell, yeah," Tilda replied, but it took them a good two hours to even make it out of the shop. This was going to be a good night.


End file.
